South Asia's Passage to Nuclear Power

to Nuclear Power 1I I Advances in the rival nuclear programs in India and Pakistan are building to a major challenge to the existing international nonproliferation regime, a patchwork affair that has remained unchanged since the seventies. Nuclear proliferation has followed a unique course in South Asia that is not well understood by the rest of the world. Specifically, the nonproliferation literature has attempted to apply the lessons of the superpower competition to a much more complex multipolar situation, and it has overlooked or misconstrued the role of China in South Asian nuclear proliferation. India and Pakistan are on the threshold of nuclear weaponization in a region that has significantborder disputes and the world’s highest incidence of terrorist violence. The nonproliferation regime has failed to halt the indigenous development of weapons-applicable technologies or to eliminate real concerns over the potential for a nuclear arms race and the safety of nuclear installations on the subcontinent. This article analyzes the present conceptual approaches to nonproliferation and some of the underlying assumptions in the literature. It argues that, in viewing nuclear arms mainly in terms of their military value, nonproliferation specialists have not fully comprehended the dynamics of regional proliferation and the perceived value of nuclear weapons in world politics. This article examines the current and likely future status of nuclear development in India and Pakistan. It points to specific incentives that have encouraged proliferation in these two nations. It argues that now there are possibilities only of a weapons-control, not a weapons-free, regime for South Asia. In the final sections, potential restraints on further proliferation are assessed, and specific steps are outlined that, if taken by the international community, could slow or halt South Asia‘s passage to overt weaponization. I argue that the single most effective nonproliferation proposal for South Asia would be an international agreement on a total test ban. But if such a Brahma Chellaney is a Visiting Scholar at the School of Advanced International Studies, The johns Hopkins University. He wrote this article while he was a senior SSRC-MacArthur Fellow in International Peace and Security at the Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C. As an Associated Press correspondent in South Asia, he won a Citation for Excellence from the Overseas Press Club of America in 1985. His writings have appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, the Melbourne Age, and the International Herald Tribune, among other places. Mr. Chellaney has also been a Research Fellow at Harvard’s Center for Science and International Affairs. He is currently completing a book on the history of U.S.-lndian conflict on nonproliferation and safeguards. [nternationalSecurity, Summer 1991 (Vol. 16, No. 1) 0 1991by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 43 lnfernational Security 26:1 I 44 step is not taken and India and Pakistan build small nuclear forces, the risks of a subcontinental nuclear war would nevertheless remain modest and manageable. The Realities of Proliferation in the Third World Understanding of the incentives and disincentives to proliferation, and formulation of anti-proliferation strategies, have been handicapped by the analytical straitjacket in which developments have been viewed by nonproliferation scholars and policymakers, and by the politicization of the subject. The nonproliferation literature has major shortcomings. Much of the literature analyzes proliferation in relation to threat perceptions and national security concerns, and views nuclear weapons mainly in military terms. The importance of nuclear weapons in the world today, however, is tied intrinsically to their political value. Nuclear weapons are not instruments for fighting wars; their military value itself derives from the political effects of the existence of nuclear arsenals, including their ability to define and shape political stability between rival nations and blocs. The political significance of nuclear weapons flows from the fact that they convey mutual annihilation and are venerated as such.' More widely, these weapons signify power in international diplomacy and in relations between states. Nuclear arms are the first truly political weapon system. It seems, therefore , natural that they bestow immense political clout on their holders. But the literature provides little analysis of the political significance of weapons to possessor states. Reluctance to scrutinize them in this wider...